The King of Kings (Cecil B. DeMille Pictures, Producers' Distributing corporation, Pathé Exchange, 1927)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 9 I watched a special Turner Classic Movies “Silent Sunday Showcase” presentation of Cecil B. DeMille’s 1927 film The King of Kings, the biopic of Jesus Christ (H. B. Warner) that was his first film set entirely in Biblical times. DeMille had actually moved into Biblical subject matter with some trepidation because he wasn’t sure genuinely religious audience members would think it was appropriate for the great Bible stories to be dramatized in such a disreputable medium as film. In 1923 he’d directed the original silent version of The Ten Commandments at Paramount (a studio he’d helped found) but hedged his bets by making only the first two-fifths of the film out of the actual story of Moses, the Exodus and the Ten Commandments. The rest of the film was a 1923-set morality tale about the McTavishes, good brother John (Richard Dix) and bad brother Dan (Rod LaRocque), and the horrible things that happen when Dan systematically breaks the Ten Commandments. DeMille shot most of the Biblical prologue in two-strip Technicolor and the modern portion in black-ahd-white, and when I got a VHS tape of The Ten Commandments in the 1980’s the color scenes were retained (though they hadn’t survived the years well and were ill-preserved, the Red Sea still parted more convincingly in 1923 than it did when DeMille did his all-Biblical remake in 1956), but when I bought the DVD of the 1956 version largely because it promised the 1923 film as a bonus, the 1923 Ten Commandments was all in black-and-white. (Bummer.)

I remember being stunned when I saw a screening of the 1927 The King of Kings in a semi-public theatre and the Resurrection scene was in two-strip Technicolor (an early version of the process that had one major limitation – it could not photograph blue, though it could approximate it with turquoise and teal – but at its best had a quiet, painterly elegance missing from the often garish hues of the three-step process which replaced it in the early 1930’s). This time around I was in for even more of a surprise: in the TCM version the famous opening scene, showing the court of Mary Magdalene (a stunning performance by Jacqueline Logan) and her hissy-fit because her boyfriend de jour, Judas Iscariot (Joseph Schildkraut), has abandoned her to follow a cult led by a wayward carpenter’s son through the back country of Judea, was also in two-strip Technicolor, and vividly preserved two-strip at that. This famous scene shows Mary Magdalene snuggling with a leopard while one of her rejected lovers complains, “You give your kisses to beasts – why not me?” Later on she delivers one of the campiest intertitles of the entire silent era as she orders her servants, “Harness my zebras, gift of the Nubian king!” (Actually, like most movie “zebras,” they’re just horses painted to look like zebras – a biological incongruity because zebras are closer to goats than horses.)

Cecil B. DeMille shot The King of Kings for his own studip, Producers’ Distributing Corporation [PDC] (not to be confused with the cheap 1940’s company Producers’ Releasing Corporation), evidently thinking that he’d already been present at the creation of one major studio and he could do it again. Unfortunately, just as he began shooting The King of Kings his financial backers sold the company out from under him and merged it with Pathé, whose parent company in France was one of the world’s most successful studios but their American subsidiary had limped along for years and just lost its greatest attraction, Harold Lloyd, ironically to Paramount. Producers’ Distributing Corporation actually released 50 films in the four years it existed, though DeMille personally directed just four. The King of Kings originally ran 155 minutes in its first-run showings, but was cut down for key-run and subsequent-run theatres to 117 minutes (easy enough to do with a silent film because you didn’t have to worry about matching soundtracks or dialogue). In 1929 Pathé had been taken over by RKO and the studio dubbed in a soundtrack in their new Photophone sound process, which quickly replaced both Warner Bros.’ Vitaphone (sound on disc records that were played along with the film( and Fox’s Movietone (a sound-on-film system like Photophone but one with lower fidelity); no new scenes were shot for the sound version (as happened with DeMille’s last PDC film, The Godless Girl), but in addition to an orchestral music soundtrack RKO-Pathé dubbed in “wild” crowd noises for the sequences showing the mob in Jerusalem howling for Jesus’s blood and demanding the release of Barabbas (variously described as a thief, a political revolutionary or, in this version, a murderer) instead. The version TCM showed ran the full 155 minutes and had a modern soundtrack, though there were no restoration credits and so I have no idea who composed it or whether it was based on the original 1929 sound version or was a new composition.

When I first saw the 1927 The King of Kings I thought it was a totally outrageous, over-the-top camp-fest. At least part of my negative reaction – I thought the film was great fun but not at all to be taken seriously – was my acute negativity towards religion in general. In the late 1970’s I was a hard-core atheist and so were most of my friends. I still don’t consider myself a religious believer, but I’ve become considerably more mellow on the subject, and the fact that my last three romantic partners (including Charles, my husband of 14 years and my partner for 13 years before that), have been committed Christians and have taken me to church for Communion had a lot to do with that. Today The King of Kings seems like a much better movie than it did in the early 1970’s, even though it suffers from the usual problem with DeMille: scenes of great dramatic and visual creativity and power alternate with scenes that are just silly (albeit gloriously silly in campily entertaining ways). The film was written by DeMille’s long-time collaborator, Jeanie Macpherson (she even gets a mention on the main title card, “The King of Kings, by Jeanie Macpherson”), with major assists from Matthew, Mark, Luke, John and the four-and-fifty scholars appointed to create the King James Bible (a majestic work of English-language literature in its own right, whatever its failings as a translation of the Hebrew and Koine Greek the Old and New Testaments, respectively, were written in). About two-thirds of the intertitles in this film directly reference or quote from Bible verses, and the Biblical citations are given in the lower right-hand corner of each title card containing one.

The story of Jesus in general and his last days in particular (and when The King of Kings starts Jesus has already established his reputation as a miracle worker who can help the lame walk and the blind see, so it’s really a more appropriate film for Easter than for Christmas) are a social and political nightmare for adapters, and it’s interesting how Dwight Macdonald’s criticism of the Biblical movies of the late 1950’s and early 1960’s (the 1959 Ben-Hur, the 1961 King of Kings – not really a remake of this one but a separate adaptation of the same story – and 1965’s The Greatest Story Ever Told in particular) don’t apply to this one. DeMille includes Jesus’s prediction to Peter, “Before the cock shall crow twice, thou shalt deny me thrice” – which Peter did – which Macdonald faulted the makers of The Greatest Story Ever Told for fudging and actually having Jesus tell Peter, “You are the rock on which my church shall be founded.” The most problematical aspect of the story of the trial and death of Jesus faced by a modern-day reteller of the story is the role of the Jews in Christ’s crucifixion, which Macdonald faulted the makers of Ben-Hur for toning way down (“Ain’t nobody here but us Romans,” he joked about that film’s crucifixion scene).

This is understandably a sore point because for millennia Christians have used it as an excuse to persecute Jews as “The Ones Who Killed Our Lord,” and the 1927 The King of Kings – made well before Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany and ordered the Holocaust – fully embraces the it’s-all-the-Jews’-fault version of the Crucifixion. Not only did he cast both Caiaphas, the High Priest of the Temple, and Judas with Jewish actors, he made them father and son: Caiaphas is played by veteran Jewish actor Rudolph Schildkraut and Judas by his real-life son, Joseph. What’s more, DeMille plays up the role of Caiaphas ini ordering the Crucifixion and plays down the role of Pontius Pilate (Victor Varconi, who would later play a Russian nobleman in exile in Paris after the Revolution in the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musical Roberta, and when I first saw The King of Kings I thought he looked like the young Marlon Brando). DeMille has Pilate tell Caiaphas, “I find no fault in this man,” a line from the Bible Macdonald faulted the makers of Ben-Hur for omitting (though he later admitted that the writers of the Gospels may have deliberately played down the Romans’ responsibility for Jesus’s crucifixion and played up that of the Jews, probably because when the Gospels were written Rome was still a major imperial power and whatever geopolitical leverage the Jews still had was ended when the Romans sacked Jerusalem and destroyed the Second Temple in 70 A.D.).

Indeed, one of the characters who makes a brief but fascinating appearance in The King of Kings is Mrs. Pilate, Procula (Majel Coleman), who not only adds her voice to Pilate’s own doubts about green-lighting the Crucifixion but seems even more against it than her husband. And one of the real surprises in the dramaturgy of The King of Kings is the way it turns into a female buddy-movie towards the end, as the two Marys – Jesus’s mother (Dorothy Cumming) and Mary Magdalene – spend a lot of time together commiserating about Jesus’s fate both pre- and post-Crucifixion. On the same day I’d earlier gone to a church service with Charles and the woman minister had preached that as a girl she was told by her church never to wear red because “red is the color of the Devil,” I was more struck than I might have been otherwise by the fact that in the two-strip Technicolor Resurrection scene, the post-conversion Mary Magdalene was wearing red as she greeted the newly risen Jesus.

Overall, The King of Kings is a mightily impressive movie, well ahead of its time in its special effects (especially the scene in which the Seven Deadly Sins come to life in a fantasy sequence to tempt Mary Magdalene to stay on the side of evil, the hauntingly beautiful point-of-view shots as Jesus’s miracle helps a young blind girl see for the first time, and the spectacular earthquake with which God expresses his anger at the Crucifixion) and overall quite striking visually. DeMille’s skills as a director actually deteriorated over his long career; when he started out he made sophisticated romantic farces including 1920’s The Affairs of Anatol (starring Gloria Swanson, Wallace Reid and Bebe Daniels and a marvelous movie far better than the similarly plotted Eyes Wide Shut, Stankey Kubrick’s last film, though both were based on writings by turn–of-the-last-century Viennese author Arthur Schnitzler), before he literally went up on the mountaintop with Moses and started thundering “Thou Shalt Not”’s at the audience. In his later films he’s surprisingly slovenly, as if he were letting his “casts of thousands” make his movies for him, but like the 1923 The Ten Commandments, the 1927 The King of Kings shows just why Cecil B. DeMille was admired and imitated by so many filmmakers, including the Soviet greats like Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Dovzhenko who were ideologically and politically at the opposite end of the scale from him.